Michael Capuzzo - The Murder Room - The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases

The following is a partial record of the sources I consulted while writing The Murder Room, offered to provide readers additional sources of information. In addition to police records, court records, interviews with investigating police officers, prosecutors and Vidocq Society investigators, and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, I read and consulted dozens of books on crime and murder. These books, written by or about Vidocq Society Members, were valuable sources:

Botha, Ted. The Girl with the Crooked Nose: A Tale of Murder, Obsession, and Forensic Artistry. New York: Random House, 2008. The story of Frank Bender’s remarkable career.

Dunn, James, and Wanda Evans. Trail of Blood: A Father, a Son, and a Telltale Crime Scene Investigation. Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon Press hardcover, 2007; Berkley True Crime paperback, 2007. A father’s search for his son’s killer ends with the Vidocq Society.

Gordon, Nathan J., and William L. Fleisher. Effective Interviewing amp; Interrogation Techniques. San Diego: Academic Press, 2002. The classic text by the Vidocq Society founder and board member.

Pettem, Silvia. Someone’s Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2009. By the Colorado journalist whose work brought the long-dormant Colorado Jane Doe case to public and police attention and to the Vidocq Society.

Ressler, Robert K., and Tom Shachtman. I Have Lived in the Monster: Inside the Minds of the World’s Most Notorious Serial Killers. New York: St. Martin ’s Paperbacks, 1997. The murder cases and forensic adventures of VSM Ressler.

Ressler, Robert K., and Tom Shachtman. Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI. New York: St. Martin ’s Paperbacks, 1992. More cases of VSM Ressler.

Stout, David. The Boy in the Box: The Unsolved Case of America’s Unknown Child. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2008. VSMs Bill Kelly, Joe McGillen, Fleisher, and others pursue the legendary child murder case.

The numerous murder cases described in The Murder Room are true stories, with only slight changes in names and circumstances in order to protect the privacy of various individuals. To avoid confusion by those readers interested in other books about Vidocq Society cases, I have used the same pseudonyms of some of the true-life characters in these books: The Girl with the Crooked Nose (Laura Shaughnessy); The Boy in the Box (John Stachowiak and Frank Guthrum); and Trail of Blood (“Jessica”).

Several other books were especially helpful, and I recommend them for readers interested respectively in the history of Philadelphia crime and the John List murders:

Avery, Ron. City of Brotherly Mayhem: Philadelphia Crimes amp; Criminals. Philadelphia: Otis Books, 1997.

Sharkey, Joe. Death Sentence: The Inside Story of the John List Murders. New York: Signet, 1990.

I also recommend the Philadelphia magazine investigative stories of author and National Magazine Award-winning journalist Stephen Fried, who broke open the Marie Noe case (see www.stephenfried.com). Fried’s reporting and personal recollections are reflected in the chapters about Marie Noe and in my understanding of the history of the Vidocq Society. The books and articles written by forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland, especially in the Vidocq Society Journal and truTV Crime Library, also were very helpful.

I read hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories on Vidocq Society cases or the Vidocq Society itself. Most stories about the society are general histories with a smattering of case and character information, often based on a reporter spending a couple hours over lunch and being asked to leave before the investigation began. These include accounts in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Associated Press, Harper’s Magazine, Reader’s Digest, London Telegraph, Montreal Gazette, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, St. Petersburg Times, Philadelphia magazine, The Pocono Record, and The Philadelphia Lawyer.

Important sources for major cases included: the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and Plainview (Texas) Daily Herald coverage of the police investigation of Scott Dunn’s murder and two trials, Dunn’s diary, travel itinerary, and other notes, tapes, photographs, and personal materials including the prepublished manuscript of his book; the Syracuse (New York) Post-Standard coverage of the Manlius murder, The Case of the Missing Face; articles in the Trentonian newspaper of Trenton, New Jersey, UPI, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Bucks County Courier Times on the murder of Terri Lee Brooks; the Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post, Boulder Daily Camera, North Platte Telegraph, USA Today, and Boulder County sheriff ’s office on the Colorado Jane Doe case; the Atlantic City Press and the CBS 48 Hours with Dan Rather documentary “Murder on the Menu” reported by Richard Schlesinger for the Zoia Assur case; AP, UPI, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, Drexel University archives on the murder of Deborah Lynn Wilson; numerous sources on John List including the New York Times, Newark Star-Ledger, truTV Crime Library, and an America’s Most Wanted episode. Thank you to J. D. Mullane of the Bucks County Courier Times for his excellent reporting and guidance on the Choir Loft Murder, based on his six-part series on the subject.

The Boy in the Box case has been extensively documented for more than half a century. The national coverage includes a July 1958 Saturday Evening Post story (“A Box, a Blanket, and a Small Body”), a 1957 Front Page Detective magazine story (“Who is the Boy in the Box?”), articles in American Way magazine, an October 1998 America’s Most Wanted episode, and a CBS 48 Hours transcript. While interviews with many Vidocq Society Members on the case were most helpful, I read more than a hundred articles dated from 1957 to the present in The Philadelphia Press-all that I could find-mostly in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News but also the Philadelphia City Paper, Northeast Times, and Frankford News Gleaner. Other sources included the Associated Press, KYW-TV Channel 3 Philadelphia, and Fleisher’s obituary of Detective Samuel Weinstein published in May 2004 by the Philadelphia area chapter of Shomrim, the national Jewish law enforcement association.

Frank Bender may be the best-known VSM outside of FBI agent Robert Ressler. In addition to an avalanche of newspaper and magazine coverage from Paris to Philadelphia, several books, an Esquire profile, and a 60 Minutes profile, I read reams of Frank’s personal materials including an unpublished autobiography. I read about Frank in sources as diverse as Harper’s Magazine; ArtForum magazine; Frieze magazine-London’s “leading magazine of contemporary arts and culture”-the transcript of an NPR/Weekend Edition interview with Frank; “Inside Corrections: The Quarterly Newsletter of the New Jersey Department of Corrections,” about the death of one of his captured fugitives (not in the book); and Rockhound News, the newsletter of the Memphis Archaeological and Geological Society on the “Ice Man.” Richard Walter contributed thick files of press and personal material, plus his professional publications from such sources as the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. In addition to Bill Fleisher’s book on interrogation, highlights of his U.S. Customs career were covered by the Philadelphia newspapers and wire services; Fleisher and Bender did an NPR “Talk of the Nation” interview in February 2009.

FBI Uniform Crime Reports since 1950 were a source of crime statistics. For historic weather, in addition to press accounts and interviews, I purchased National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Local Climatological Data weather charts for Lubbock, Texas, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and consulted weather data on the Web from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the Weather Underground. The Web was useful in hundreds of ways, from the Boy in the Box Web site-americasunknownchild.net-and its treasure trove of information to the Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.